Day: January 17, 2006

Newt Gingrich, 1994:

“I clearly fascinate them,” Gingrich said of the Democrats. “I’m much more intense, much more persistent, much more willing to take risks to get it done. Since they think it is their job to run the plantation, it shocks them that I’m actually willing to lead the slave rebellion.”

Hillary Clinton, 2006:

“When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation and you know what I’m talking about,” said Senator Clinton. “We have cronyism, we have incompetence. I predict to you that this administration will go down as one of the worst that has ever governed our country.”

From Associated Press Wire Reports:

Austria to Return Art to California Woman
VIENNA, Austria – Austria said Tuesday it will honor an arbitration court decision and give five precious Gustav Klimt paintings to a California woman who says the Nazis stole them from her Jewish family. “We’ll give you back the paintings if you promise not to give us back Schwarzenegger,” said a spokesman for Austria.

Al-Jazeera Hires Lawyers to Get Transcript
CAIRO, Egypt – Al-Jazeera has hired a British law firm to press its request to British Prime Minister Tony Blair for a partial transcript of a conversation between him and U.S. President George W. Bush in which the American leader allegedly said the Arab broadcaster’s headquarters should be bombed. Blair offered a Xerox copy of the Downing Street Memo instead.

Belgium PM: U.S. Relations Need More Work
WASHINGTON – Belgium’s prime minister told President Bush on Tuesday that while the United States has improved its relationship with Europe in the last year, “there is certainly a lot of work still to do.” In response, Bush offered to clear brush around The Hague.

Olmert Seeks to Begin Work on Peace Deal
JERUSALEM – Acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in his first policy statement Tuesday that he hopes to start working on a final peace deal with the Palestinians after Israel’s March 28 elections, and hinted that Palestinians in Jerusalem might not always be under Israeli rule. “But I’d keep my eye on those evangelical Christians moving into Galilee,” Olmert added.

Iran Lifts CNN Ban; Amanpour Criticized
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran on Tuesday lifted a ban it had imposed on CNN a day earlier for misquoting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. During the ban, CNN simply ran the same Iran stories it has been running since December.

Cheney Talks Iraq With Egypt’s Mubarak
CAIRO, Egypt – Vice President Dick Cheney met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Tuesday for talks on the political process in Iraq and the West’s standoffs with Syria and Iran. “F@#k you,” said Cheney.

Iraq Elections Commission Issues Ruling
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s electoral commission ruled Monday that more than 99 percent of the ballots from the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections are valid. That’s about 66 percent better than Florida did in 2000.

John Ashcroft is still wrong: When he said doctor-assisted suicide was “not a legitimate medical purpose” in 2001, Ashcroft was wrong, and the Supreme Court confirmed it today when it refused to support the Bush administration’s attempt to punish Oregon physicians who help terminally ill patients die under the state’s assisted suicide statute.

In a harbinger of things to come, the Gang of Three — Chief Justice John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — found themselves together on the far right arguing that federal officials have the power to regulate the doling out of medicine: “If the term `legitimate medical purpose’ has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death,” Scalia wrote in the dissenting opinion.

Of course, if it’s the state — sanctioned by the Supreme Court — putting to death blind, deaf, crippled, 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen with an overdose of prescription drugs, I suppose that’s constitutes a “legitimate legal purpose.”

I think assisted suicide should be legal everywhere and available in the way that Kurt Vonnegut envisioned it: The Ethical Suicide Parlor is associated with Howard Johnson’s. When an individual gets so depressed by the state of the world and so disheartened by the lack of ability and leadership in the government, he goes to HoJo’s, has a free meal, complete with his choice of 39 flavors of ice cream. After dinner, he goes next door to the suicide parlor and, in a comfortable, soothing environment, is gently euthanized by a beautiful buxom blonde.

Maybe Ashcroft would approve of that — nah.

Terrible on terror: Remember back last year to Dec. 5, when former members of the 9/11 Commission issued a report card for how Congress and the Bush administration had implemented the commission’s reasonable recommendations? No? All you can remember is the bitter controversy over how retailers and Lefties were attacking Xmas? That’s convenient for the legislature and prez, ain’t it?

Well, now the National Journal has published a comprehensive article detaiiling exactly why the commission gave out D’s and F’s like my high-school geometry teacher. It’s long and detailed, but well worth reading.

To get answers, National Journal looked at 14 of the 17 most-important commission recommendations that scored the worst grades — the D’s and F’s — and examined the roadblocks to their implementation. The causes behind the failing and near-failing grades fall into six categories: a Congress resistant to institutional change; a bureaucracy that bucks new ideas; lack of money; lack of leadership; special interests that have the ear of Congress or the White House; and, finally, an inability to accurately see how the United States is perceived abroad.

To be sure, not everyone agrees that the 9/11 commission’s recommendations are the end-all, be-all cure — the commissioners themselves admit that their conclusions are imperfect. Critics of particular recommendations may be motivated by nothing more than a differing view of how best to combat terrorism.

Still, the commission’s report card represents the most thorough assessment to date of how far the country has come in bolstering its security since 9/11. At the end of their long trip, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton [chair and vice chair of the commission] could have invoked Robert Frost: We have miles to go before we sleep.

[…]

O! The incompetence: As has often been said, the only thing George W. Bush is competent at is lying. Now we learn he’s even incompetent at being a dictator. It turns out that the thousands of wiretaps he “repeatedly and insistently” — and illegally — ordered against U.S. citizens overwhelmed the intelligence system in the aftermath of 9/11:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans’ international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.

[…]

Here is why we will invade Iran before the November elections:

President George W. Bush’s job approval rating dipped below 40 percent in a new telephone poll by Zogby International.

Zogby said Sunday 39 percent of those polled said they approved of the Bush’s job performance, and 40 percent who said the nation overall is headed in the right direction.

The deterioration in Bush’s numbers appears to be the result of eroding support among investors who backed his 2004 re-election bid, said John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International.